Dog Tags
by CDS
Summary: Bashir struggles to save a patient's life--and his own--after a crash-landing in enemy territory.


DISCLAIMER: Star Trek and its various characters, ships, etc. are the property of Paramount pictures and not me. They're not mine, and I'm not making any money off them with this story. I just watch their shows, see their movies, buy their stuff, put their kids through college, pay for their boats, etc.   


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Dog Tags

  

_"Move! Move! Move!_" The young lieutenant shouted, waving the arm that didn't cradle a phaser rifle. It carved a visible arc in the pounding, driving rain of the god-forsaken moon. Crewmen followed his lead, scrambled away from the junked lifeboats-now little more than crumpled containers that looked as if they'd been wadded up by a giant fist-and up the steep, muddy slope of the soft-land point. 

Bashir pushed himself forward on his good leg, staggered when his weight fell on his sprained one, and felt his med-kit slither out of grasp. He bent down to pick it up, feeling his bad leg cry out as he was bumped and jostled by evacuating crewmen. He didn't recognize many of them--not even under the scalding exterior emergency lights of the pods-but he hadn't been on the _Bellerophon_ long, and the _Col'Tsu, _and the _Grammercy_ had all been caught in the same ambush. The lifeboats had linked up regardless of ship of origin. Consequently, the people of this cluster were a motley mix of crews. 

Among the hurried faces he saw around him, Bashir noticed several laceration, and even caught quick glimpses of uncoordinated pupil-dilation-telltale sign of a concussion-but he saw no more serious injuries. Care could wait until they reached the safe area a kilometer and a half north. 

The first Jem'Hadar disruptor blast slit the sheets of rain like a knife-the droplets even sizzling and evaporating off its energy matrix-and slammed into the woman Bashir recognized as having coordinated the soft-landing of the lifeboats. She had a round, apple-shaped face with dark eyes and severe bun of hair and color in her cheeks. The bolt of energy hit her in one of those cheeks with a sickening splat/sizzle and twisted her head to side with such force that over the commotion around him, Bashir heard the neck snap like brittle kindling. The woman hit the ground, the mud sucking at the edges of her form, the side of her face a clean, steaming skull. 

The crewmen screamed, shouted challenges, orders, their cries mingling with those of the charging Jem'Hadar who were now only recognizable on the opposite ridge as faint, nightmarish shapes in the rain. 

_"Go! We'll hold them off!"_ The young lieutenant called out, and Bashir noticed that he'd been joined by a handful of heavily armed crewmen. Two had compression-rifles, two had pulse-phasers, and one toted a wicked-looking SMPC. Bashir guessed he must have been from the _Grammercy,_ the only ship large enough to deliver troops and equipment of that nature. 

Bashir moved with the rest of the fleeing crewmen. The mud made a nice cushion for his bad leg, but he was still dead-last in a group of about twenty. He stumbled and staggered, digging the toes of his boots into the rapidly-eroding mud, clenching his teeth against the aggravating trickles of water that encircled his lowered face. His uniform was saturated and felt like it weighed twenty pounds. 

Then the grenade went off. A calm, slightly jaundiced part of Bashir's mind noted with disappointment that he was so damn familiar with the things that he could tell it was Starfleet-issue simply from the sound. Bodies tumbled, twisted in a dim glow ahead and above him on the ridge, a few went sliding down the muddy slope to the soft-land point like children playing on a snowbank. The group was moving again. Whoever had accidentally set off the grenade was either dead or at the bottom of the ridge. In any cases, there were no cries for a medic. Only screams from below him. 

Twisting around, he could see the young lieutenant and his defenders firing from defensive position behind debris from the lifeboats. The Jem'Hadar were returning fire with vicious efficiency, but were in the tactically worse position. They obviously had no grenades or mortars and were reliant upon their rifles. They also had no cover and simply advanced inexorably into the orange flame. Directly beneath him, three bodies twitched and screamed guttural, rain-choked cries. Bashir hesitated a moment, then dislodged his boots and slid down after them. 

He landed as softly as the lifeboats had and in a small splash of dirty water and mud. Half his uniform was solid black, and he felt the grime wriggle its way beneath the layers and coat his skin. He made a mental note to give himself and the rest of this group a full battery of antibiotics when they got to safety. That thought was filed away as he crawled over to the three bodies. It wasn't hard to tell who'd detonated the grenade-he didn't much of an abdomen left, just a steaming, cauterized cavity devoid of organs and most of the bones typical of a mid-life Vulcan. All-in-all his corpse looked like a cadaver in an autopsy gone horribly wrong. Bashir went to the next, fumbling for his tricorder with rain-slick fingers. 

_"Ah...God! I..."_ Bashir ignored the cries of the young man. The rain was already washing the blood from his face. His tricorder read thready life-signs, spiking and flattening as the body tried to make sense of what was happening to it. The left arm ended just past the elbow and still pumped gouts of blood. Bashir opened his medical kit, pulled out a hypo and loaded it with anesthetic. _"Please! I...Oh God...Momma! I want to go HOME! I want to go HOME! Please don't make me..."_ The SMPC thundered, then an explosion drown out the man's cries and Bashir's own inadequate response, and by the time he could hear again, the anesthetic had drugged the man into silence. The body still hadn't shut off the blood to his demolished arm, and Bashir let fly a string of curses in virtually every language he knew when he saw when he didn't find any derm-seals in his kit. He'd meant to stock up on those from _Bellerophon_'s sickbay. 

_Bloody hell...All right, then, antibiotics all around..._ He then relied on the old trick that combat medics for hundreds of years before him had resorted to in the worst of conditions. He grabbed a handful of mud and slapped it on the end of the bleeding stump. If the rain didn't wash it away before the blood supply to the limb was cut off, the man might have a chance. He moved on. 

The third was a woman, knocked unconscious by the concussion, but missed by the worst of the blast. The tricorder picked up the damage as shrapnel wounds in her leg and trunk. The aaorta and part of the right auricle had been shredded, but that was easy enough to repair. 

With time. 

A scream, caused him to drop the dermal regenerator into the plastic med kit. Hazarding a quick glance over his shoulder, he saw the Jem'Hadar slowly advancing down the slope. One of the defenders had been hit in the chest. No helping him. 

"Doc, what the hell are you doing? Get outta here!" The young lieutenant shouted from his position as he reloaded his rifle and tossed the empty power-pack. 

"I've got two wounded here!" Bashir shouted back. 

"Leave 'em!" 

"No! This one," he pointed to the young man, "can live if he gets to the evac point. This one needs to be stabilized-but she can live too!" 

The young lieutenant swore, his form becoming sketchy through the rain, like a transmission jammed with static. "All right!" Then the rest of his voice got lost in the pounding of rain and weapons fire. A moment later two of the defenders-a woman with Ensign pips and a burly Telluride whose fur was matted with water-scurried over and grabbed the young man. 

"Careful of his arm!" Bashir called to them. 

"You don't say," The Telluride grunted, just before they disappeared up the slope and into the darkness and rain. 

"We'll hold them off," the young lieutenant called, hefting his rifle. "You stabilize her and then _get your ass outta here!"_

Bashir didn't say anything, just went to work. He cut her uniform away, exposing pale and soft flesh. Using the tricorder to see into her body he made three quick incisions to give him access to the chest cavity. Fortunately, the lungs wouldn't obstruct his access to the bleeders. Behind him, phaser rifles whined and challenges were barked. The sound of Jem'Hadar weaponary was getting louder. 

Closing the lacerations on the aorta was easy enough-muscular tissue just loves to regenerate itself-but the auricle proved more problematic. One of the semi-lunar valves wasn't functioning. Swearing, Bashir put the regenerator down atop the woman's thigh, and pulled a micro-calliper from his kit. With a slight prick, he inserted the microscopic computer ship. The nano-technology in the chip would spread through the valve until the chip itself would govern the functions of the valve. Sighing in exhaultation, Bashir scooped up the slippery regenerator and went back to work. 

More fire, more screams. A blue disruptor bolt exploded a few meters away, showering him in mud. He bent over the open chest, then went back to work closing up. A human cry caused him to look over his shoulder. The other defender was buried in mud, firing his compression-rifle madly. Most of his skull was gone, and the brain was locked into one mode. Bashir knew the body would continue to fire the rifle until a blood-bearing organ was damaged or the brain shorted out. A few meters to his right, the young lieutenant stopped shooting long enough to look over at his comrade-a grotesque zombie, continuing to fight despite the fact it should have been dead-then, apparently deciding that any support-fire was adequate support-fire, he went back to killing Jem'Hadar. They came over the ridge face in droves. 

Bashir closed, checked the woman's vitals. Stable but not great. He felt like doing a jig. Suddenly he was blinded and rain hissed around him. When his eyes cleared and he could see the rain again, he noticed the body before seemed to have shifted. The Jem'Hadar disruptor bolt had severed the woman's head from her shoulders, burning away most of the neck. 

He whirled, screaming an unintelligible cry of rage and frustration. This wasn't bloody fair! You just _don't_ kill people who've only got a fifty-fifty chance of living! What was wrong with these...these damned _animals_ anyway? 

Bashir didn't have a weapon, so he threw the med-kit, the regenerator, the micro-callipers, and finally the tricorder at the Jem'Hadar who'd reached the bottom of the ridge and walked assuredly on the backs of their dead. _Bloody animals!_

_"Get outta here, doc! She's gone! I'll hold them off, you get out of here!"_ The brain-dead defender was now just dead, and it was only the young lieutenant and his appropriated pulse-phaser. 

_"Kill a few for me!"_ Bashir shouted, but his words were lost in the rapid-fire whine of the pulse phaser. He spun and scrambled up the ridge, bad leg be damned. Behind him, he heard the cries of dying Jem'Hadar and slap of their bodies against the watery mud. He delighted in each one.   
  

********

What he remembered about the hike across the rough, fluid terrain to the evac point was the monotony. The rain, the pain of his leg, the exhaustion and discomfort of his body, even his terror at being captured, all faded into monotony after a few hours. He simply became bored with it. Likewise, he became bored with the rage, the gleeful memories of every Jem'Hadar he'd seen die, every ship of theirs he'd seen destroyed by Captain Sisko and the _Defiant_. By the time the Hopper caught him in its searchbeams, he was simply exhausted and fell fast asleep on the trip up to the _Enterprise._

The Vulcan who'd detonated the grenade, he learned, was a young recruit named Solest. He'd been in Starfleet Science for less than a year. Witnesses around him said he was reaching for his tricorder, caught the detonator stud of the grenade instead. 

The young man was Lieutenant Commander Schubert. He lived, thanked Bashir profusely from the _Enterprise_ sick bay, and joked with Nurse Ogawa, pinching her with his new mechanical prosthetic and then, sheepishly mumbling "musta been a servo malfunction." 

The two defenders who died were Ensign Peter Harmon and Ensign Chad Davies. Both were in Security. Both were on their first assignment, Harmon with the _Grammercy,_ and Davies with the _Col'Tsu_.. The one who'd continued fighting despite the lack of much of his skull was Ensign Janusz Brokowski of the Federation Marines. His comrades who'd been aboard the _Grammercy_ had loved the details of his death and made Bashir recount them no fewer than five times. 

The woman Bashir had saved, the woman the Jem'Hadar had killed, was Lieutenant Molly Delaney. She was a linguist, working on the _Bellerophon_ in code-breaking. She had two children living with their father on Luna. Bashir wrote them the letter. 

No one knew the young lieutenant and there wasn't enough of him left when Commander Data's insurgency team recovered the body, to create an adequate facial recreation. No one from either of the ship had a clear idea of who he was. Many never even saw him, only heard a voice. Bashir spent the better part of a month upon his return to _Deep Space Nine_ trying to identify the man, but he never did. 


End file.
